And that makes the profusion of 10th-anniversary specials blanketing television throughout the weekend daunting to contemplate, let alone watch. Seeing those images and hearing all those stories is a painful exercise at best, cathartic only in the sense that repression is worse.

What happened that day was unimaginable, and, 10 years on, so is not going over it, again and again.

The world changed, but not in the way we hoped. Irony didn’t end, partisanship came back, sacrifice wasn’t shared. So much thought, time and effort have gone into trying to examine the consequences of Sept. 11. There are so many documentaries, and not just on the networks, public television and cable news but also all over channels like Nickelodeon and A&E, the home of “Hoarders.” Viewers can watch George W. Bush retell his handling of that day on National Geographic; they can turn to OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, and find out how five Sept. 11 widows rebuilt their lives.

Some specials are so niche-sensitive that they almost sound like humor-magazine parodies: CNBC, which has a series called “American Greed,” came up with “American Greed: 9-11 Fraud,” about the scams and profiteering that followed the disaster. Showtime offers “The Love We Make,” about Paul McCartney’s journey through New York after Sept. 11. (Bravo, thankfully, did not try to wedge its “Real Housewives” formula into the mix.)

Most are well made and well intended, but many are as much a reflection of the channel showing them as they are a prism on the anniversary.

All the networks are pre-empting their Sunday-morning programming to provide live coverage of the ceremonies at ground zero, showcasing anchors like Diane Sawyer, who was the co-anchor on ABC’s “Good Morning America” when the first plane hit the twin towers, and Tom Brokaw of NBC News, who became part of the story when anthrax was found in his office suite. (Brokaw also has his own two-hour Sept. 11 special on “Dateline NBC” tonight.)

But it is a day when the distant wail of firetruck sirens sound ominous, nerves grow raw and viewers become hypersensitive to the misplaced word or self-serving gesture. Sept. 11 is an event that needs no introduction; it may be best to experience the 10th anniversary with a reticent tour guide.

In that sense “9-11: The Days After,” tonight on the History channel, is highly effective. It opens not with music or soaring shots of the World Trade Center before the attacks but in a men’s clothing shop: a hand-held camera darts in disbelief around counters stacked with dress shirts that are covered in a thick crust of ash and dust, then to a blasted-out window that opens onto a mountain of debris topped by that terrible, leaning skeleton of girders.

What follows is a pastiche of unnarrated footage that perfectly captures the confusion and fear that witnesses felt in those first few hours and then days: a young woman rushing from her apartment to get her child from school, people on the street near ground zero walking up and down and in circles, blankly clutching their cellphones for solace.

Officers in uniform behind the police tape stare at the Pentagon in flames with their hands over their mouths like shocked civilians. The film follows rescue workers and volunteers clearing wreckage without masks or in some cases, gloves.

“Beyond 9-11: Portraits of Resilience,” a collaboration by Time magazine and HBO, will be shown on CNN today and Saturday; HBO will show it on Sunday at 8:46 a.m., the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center. “Beyond 9-11” delivers the same immediacy with the opposite approach: Witnesses recount their experiences, without a visible interviewer, against a stark white background that intensifies the testimony.

This documentary starts with Brian Clark, then a Euro Brokers employee who managed to escape from high up in the south tower with the stranger he rescued, Stanley Praimnath. They describe what happened, and Clark especially tells the story with a good-humored lilt in his voice, as if describing an arduous commute to Long Island.

Their survival tale is a welcoming way in to a story that has few happy surprises.

In no particular order the camera moves on to a woman who lost her husband on United Airlines Flight 93, and then to Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist whose son died in Iraq. George W. Bush has his say in front of the camera, and so does a former Army captain, James J. Yee, who was a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until he was charged with espionage and held in solitary confinement for 76 days; all charges were later dropped.

Not everyone is a hero in this documentary, and no two stories are exactly alike; but together they deliver a portrait of Sept. 11 and its aftermath that is as powerful and sobering as any photograph.

There have been only a few efforts to produce fictional dramas about the attacks, probably because even a decade feels too early to make anything that might smack of entertainment. “The Space Between” on USA on Sunday evening, sticks out as one of the more unusual commemorations. It is a made-up story about a troubled flight attendant (Melissa Leo) who, though grounded after the attacks, must take a 10-year-old Pakistani-American passenger, Omar (Anthony Keyvan), back to New York to find his father, who worked in the World Trade Center.

The film is surprisingly good because it’s not dreadful: It is so easy to go wrong when trying to do the right thing on television. USA commissioned “The Space Between” as part of a public-service campaign against discrimination, and the story is weighed down by the forced coincidences and piped epiphanies of an after-school special.

It’s redeemed by bleak cinematography, muted performances and understated relationships that convey the panic and despair of those early days, but also the rare, heady dawning of fellowship forged in grief.

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